From September to October, 2023, the widowed elderly women in a community in Deyang City, Sichuan Province, were investigated by convenient sampling method. Inclusion criteria: age ≥ 60 years old; Widowed; Clear consciousness, no language communication and communication barriers; Informed consent and voluntary participation in this study. Exclusion criteria: people with hearing impairment.

General information questionnaire includes three parts. Part 1: personal basic information, such as age, education, professional status, hobbies, religious beliefs, monthly income and physical condition. Part 2: formal support system, such as old-age insurance, accident insurance, and participation in community temple fairs. Part 3: informal system includes family situation (number of children, way of providing for the aged, membership relationship, time and frequency of children’s visits, etc.), neighborhood relationship (number and time of active and passive door-to-door visits, number of friends in the neighborhood), and local customs and conventions (participation in New Year’s greetings and double ninth festival parties, etc.)

UCLA Loneliness Scale is a one-dimensional scale with 20 items, and each item is scored by four grades, and the four grades of “never”, “rarely”, “sometimes” and “always” are integrated with “1”, “2”, “3” and “4” correspondingly (9 of them are called reverse scoring). After the measurement, add the scores. If the score is greater than or equal to 44, it means that loneliness is very strong. If the score is lower than 28, it means that loneliness is very weak. Most people score between 33 and 39.

This study mainly adopts the questionnaire survey method. A survey team composed of community administrators who have been trained in a unified way is responsible for the investigation, unifying the instructions, obtaining the informed consent of the respondents during the investigation, and explaining the methods, precautions and confidentiality principles of the questionnaire survey to the respondents. Then, the investigators conducted a face-to-face question-and-answer questionnaire survey and filled it out on their behalf according to the oral choice of the respondents. After the questionnaire is completed, it will be collected on the spot, and all the collected questionnaires will be carefully checked and the data will be entered by two people. After the data is recorded, 20% of the samples are randomly selected for re-recording, and the consistency of the input data is checked to ensure the accuracy of the data in this study. A total of 80 copies were distributed in this study. 77 valid questionnaires were collected, and the effective rate was 96.25%.

EpiData 3.1 software was used to establish a database for data entry, and SPSS 26.0 software was used for statistical analysis. The measurement data conforming to the normal distribution were expressed as mean standard deviation (x ± s). The measurement data of non-normal distribution are expressed by median (M) and interquartile interval (IQR), and the statistically significant factors in general data are taken as independent variables, and multiple stepwise regression analysis is carried out. Inspection level α = 0.05.

The survey results show that the total score of UCLA is (46.56 ± 6.68), and more than 72.73% of the subjects scored more than 43 points in UCLA, as shown in Table 1 . According to the scoring standard, the respondents’ loneliness score is high and most of them have a strong sense of loneliness.

A total of 77 elderly widowed women completed the questionnaire survey, of which junior high school education or above accounted for 61.04%, as shown in Table 2 .

Single-factor analysis showed that there were significant differences in loneliness scores of widowed elderly women with different age, hobbies, children’s financial support and neighborhood relations, as shown in Table 3 .

* p < 0.05 ** p < 0.01

Using whether feel lonely as independent variables and different age, hobbies, children’s financial support, neighborhood relations as dependent variables, a logistic regression analysis was conducted. The results showed that different hobbies and children’s financial support did not enter the regression equation. Younger and well neighborhood relations(Have more than 2 friends in the community and spend at least 30 minutes with them every week) are the protective factors for loneliness, as shown in Table 4 .

The total scores of loneliness of 77 elderly widowed women who participated in the survey were (46.56 ± 6.68), which was higher than the normal loneliness range of 33 - 39, indicating that their loneliness level was high. This is consistent with many previous research results ( Mangarun, 2020 ; King, 2020 ; Sun et al., 2021 ). What’s more, the survey results show that the widowed elderly aged ≥ 80 have the highest loneliness score (50.38 ± 3.45), and 60 - 69 have the lowest loneliness score (44.59 ± 7.60), this is consistent with Wang’s research results ( Huang et al., 2023 ).

Through the results of univariate and multivariate analysis, it is known that widowed elderly women of different ages and neighborhood relationships have different loneliness, and the difference is statistically significant. The overall performance is that the older and the worse neighborhood relations are, the stronger their sense of loneliness is. This may be because with age, physical activity decreases, and participation in social activities outside gradually decreases. Colleagues and children are busy with work, ultimately leading to a weak social support system for elderly widowed women ( Huang et al., 2023 ). The economic support of children showed significance in univariate analysis, but showed no significance in multivariate analysis. This may be due to the fact that as the age of elderly widowed women increases, the economic support of children also increases, resulting in significant economic support for children in univariate analysis.

Nowadays, the departments providing services for the elderly are becoming increasingly diversified. In the context of family based elderly care in China, community services are an important part of ensuring the health of the elderly. However, due to inadequate community promotion, elderly widowed women have weak awareness of community participation. They do not understand or even know about these service departments, lack bridges to connect with them, and lack community integration, which is not conducive to adapting and starting a new life after widowhood. In recent years, China has begun to implement grid based services in communities, where each community worker has a corresponding fixed service target. They play the role of resource providers, helping the elderly contact government departments, enterprises and institutions, volunteer departments, and community (family) departments to obtain the resources needed by elderly widows and widowers, and pass them on to them, improving the efficiency of helping others.